Hand hygiene noncompliance is a serious health concern around the world that plagues hospitals, other health care environments, schools, food handling operations, and many others. In fact, hand hygiene noncompliance is the leading cause of hospital acquired infections (HAIs), which affect millions of patients every year. In some studies, HAIs are the majority cause of all infection-based hospital deaths each and every year. This is particularly troublesome due to the reality that patients who acquire HAIs were not admitted to the hospital or healthcare facility with the HAI but instead contracted the infection at the hospital or healthcare facility due to poor hygiene.
A major contributing factor for HAIs is a combination of hospital employee complacency and visitor ignorance. Specifically, a leading cause of HAIs is the result of physicians, nurses, other healthcare providers, and patients' guests' failure to properly sanitize their hands between touching hospital surfaces prior to interacting with other patients. Commonly, individuals either do not know of the proper hand hygiene steps, or the individuals do not use care to sanitize their hands at each step for the appropriate length of time. In addition, while staff members receive training and education on hand hygiene, visitors do not receive any training or education beyond passive dispensers and passive placards not coupled with the passive dispensers.
There are many types of hand hygiene compliance monitoring systems and methods today that monitor dispensing of hand sanitizer. Several known monitoring systems, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,294,584; 8,294,585; 8,249,295; and 7,542,586; and Publication Nos. 2012/0212582; 2009/0276239; 2010/0315243; and 2008/0136649, teach methods for monitoring practices for better hand hygiene habits, but they do not provide for a related but unresolved problem, inter alia, the insufficient encouragement and inefficient instruction related to carrying out proper hand hygiene procedures. For example, known systems do nothing to attract attention and are, therefore, easy to walk past without using. While some hospitals post passive information placards to instruct visitors about hand sanitization, the placards are not attention grabbing, which causes patients, doctors, nurses, and the like to overlook them. The prior art systems, therefore, fail to provide individuals with instructions on carrying out hand hygiene procedures, such as teaching the individual steps of a proper hand hygiene process. Moreover, the prior hand hygiene compliance monitoring systems are not adaptable to changing environments. In addition, the prior hand hygiene compliance monitoring systems are stationary, which cannot be placed, for example, next to the bedside of a patient, allowing the patient to monitor staff and visitor compliance before coming into contact with the patient.
Further, the prior art systems do not differentiate between sanitation events or conditions. All uses of the sanitization devices are treated equally regardless of vastly different outcomes of failure or success. That is, failure to sanitize in an acute patient room is treated the same as a failure to sanitize while treating an immune suppressed patient. In addition, the known prior-art systems are not able encourage increased use and pass/fail monitoring criteria in accordance with changing conditions in the environment such as, for example, an epidemic, flu season, or other conditions.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.